International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Aug 23, 2021
This paper presents an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper... more This paper presents an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper articles on the coronavirus pandemic. We develop a tagset in an interdisciplinary team from corpus linguistics and sociology. After working out a gold standard on a pilot corpus, we apply the annotation to the entire corpus drawing on an “annotation-by-query” approach inCQPWeb, based on uncertainty constructions that have been extracted from the gold standard data. The annotated data are then evaluated and sociologically contextualised. On this basis, we study the development of uncertainty markers in the period under study and compare media discourses in Germany and the UK. Our findings reflect the different courses of the pandemic in Germany and the UK as well as the different political responses, media traditions and cultural concerns: While markers of fear are more important in British discourse, we see a steadily increasing level of disagreement in German discourse. Other forms of uncertainty such as ‘possibility’ or ‘probability’ are similarly frequent in both discourses.
The discourse on climate change has become a centerpiece of public debate, thereby creating a pre... more The discourse on climate change has become a centerpiece of public debate, thereby creating a pressing need to analyze the multitude of messages created by the participants in this communication process. In addition to text, information on this topic is conveyed multimodally, through images, videos, tables and other data objects that are embedded within documents and accompany the text. This paper presents the process of building a multimodal pilot corpus to the InsightsNet Climate Change Corpus (ICCC) and using natural language processing (NLP) tools to enrich corpus (meta)data, thus creating a dataset that lends itself to the exploration of the interplay between the various modalities that constitute the discourse on climate change. We demonstrate how the pilot corpus can be queried for relevant information in two types of databases, and how the proposed data model promotes a more comprehensive sentiment analysis approach.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Aug 23, 2021
This paper presents an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper... more This paper presents an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper articles on the coronavirus pandemic. We develop a tagset in an interdisciplinary team from corpus linguistics and sociology. After working out a gold standard on a pilot corpus, we apply the annotation to the entire corpus drawing on an “annotation-by-query” approach inCQPWeb, based on uncertainty constructions that have been extracted from the gold standard data. The annotated data are then evaluated and sociologically contextualised. On this basis, we study the development of uncertainty markers in the period under study and compare media discourses in Germany and the UK. Our findings reflect the different courses of the pandemic in Germany and the UK as well as the different political responses, media traditions and cultural concerns: While markers of fear are more important in British discourse, we see a steadily increasing level of disagreement in German discourse. Other forms of uncertainty such as ‘possibility’ or ‘probability’ are similarly frequent in both discourses.
The discourse on climate change has become a centerpiece of public debate, thereby creating a pre... more The discourse on climate change has become a centerpiece of public debate, thereby creating a pressing need to analyze the multitude of messages created by the participants in this communication process. In addition to text, information on this topic is conveyed multimodally, through images, videos, tables and other data objects that are embedded within documents and accompany the text. This paper presents the process of building a multimodal pilot corpus to the InsightsNet Climate Change Corpus (ICCC) and using natural language processing (NLP) tools to enrich corpus (meta)data, thus creating a dataset that lends itself to the exploration of the interplay between the various modalities that constitute the discourse on climate change. We demonstrate how the pilot corpus can be queried for relevant information in two types of databases, and how the proposed data model promotes a more comprehensive sentiment analysis approach.
Uploads
Papers by Sabine Bartsch